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Have you ever looked at photos of galaxies and wondered what it would be like if they could communicate with each other? These are embryoid bodies which were differentiated to become motor neurons, and I believe they look just like that: two bulbous galaxies filled with blue “cellular planets” stretching across space with their light-blue neurite webbing,
searching and finding one another to open thousands of dots of communication. In the mammalian body, these networks stretch their processes to communicate with muscle tissue and can regulate major motor functions and have the potential to even repair degenerated motor nerves. We study these neuronal circuits to be able to manipulate their function by taking advantage of their specialized membrane (shown in red) and using them to drive function in bio-bots made from skeletal muscle. However, at the end of the day, they are my “talking galaxies”.